1 General overview

This edited volume is a collection of papers on phonological development and language disorders, compiled in honour of David Ingram in recognition of his contribution to these fields of study. There is also some initial focus on the International Child Phonology Conference (ICPC), which for about forty years has served as the conference for the child phonology research community. The book is the 19th volume in the ‘Communication Disorders across Languages’ series. The cross-linguistic focus of the volume as well as of the series as a whole serves the important goal of making less well-known research on (and in) languages other than English accessible to an international audience.

In a nutshell, the papers in the volume report on empirical studies of child speech development (typical and impaired) in various languages, taking place in a monolingual environment. Collectively, they provide valuable information on the acquisition of selected aspects of cross-linguistic (segmental and prosodic) structure, available assessment tools and current intervention practice. The studies differ in their theoretical and clinical relevance, with some contributing to both domains. They also differ in scope, ranging from small-scale preliminary studies, based on novel or already existing corpora, to large-scale normative studies, the latter being essential from the point of view of constructing screening tests to allow for early intervention in children with speech delays. The languages under investigation include Dutch, American English, French, Greek, Israeli Hebrew, Hungarian, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Mexican Spanish and Valley Zapotec.

In what follows, I present the structure of the volume and the focus of each of the chapters, with the aim of highlighting potential points of interest for phonologists working on various aspects of child language acquisition. Such short highlights cannot reflect the (rather likeable) loquacity of many chapters, which give generous background not only on the acquisitional issues considered, but also on the corresponding languages and cultures. A few notes on the presentation of Polish, my native language, appear in a separate section towards the end of this review.

2 Structure of the volume

The collection begins with two introductory chapters, ‘Prolegomenon’ (Elena Babatsouli) and ‘History of the International Child Phonology Conference’ (Elena Babatsouli & Karen Pollock). These are followed by a section, ‘In the spotlight’, which contains just one chapter, ‘Ingram's contributions to the study of first language acquisition, according to Ingram’, in which David Ingram comments on his work. The remaining chapters are organised into three parts: ‘Typical development’ (Chapters 4–8), ‘Atypical development’ (Chapters 9–15) and ‘Assessment and intervention’ (Chapters 16–18).

3 Introductory chapters

In Chapter 1, Babatsouli presents a brief historical background on the scientific study of child phonological development, lists examples of studies in protolanguage phonology and sketches out foundations of the normative approach. She also considers selected theoretical perspectives: the Prague school (Trubetzkoy Reference Trubetzkoy1939), Jakobson's (Reference Jakobson1941) Kindersprache, SPE phonology (Chomsky & Halle Reference Chomsky and Halle1968), natural phonology (e.g. Stampe Reference Stampe1969), neo-Jakobsonian theory (Ingram Reference Ingram1988) and the non-linear constraint-based approach of Bernhardt & Stemberger (Reference Bernhardt and Stemberger1998). Usage-based (cognitive functional) theories, whose central tenet is that ‘language structure emerges from language use’ (Tomasello Reference Tomasello2003: 5), are omitted – only a brief mention of ‘the Stanford group’ (cf. Ferguson & Farwell's Reference Ferguson and Farwell1975 seminal paper) appears in the chapter. However, some contributions in the volume explicitly refer to such models, addressing the roles of pattern formation (Villalobos-Pedroza; Ch. 6), discourse type (Kornev & Balčiūnienė; Ch. 10) and input frequency (Stemberger & Chávez-Peón; Ch. 7). Given the vibrant diversity of the phonological field today, this kind of constructive dialogue seems essential.

In Chapter 2, Babatsouli & Pollock discuss the origins of the International Child Phonology Conference as a conference linking speech-language pathology practice and linguistic theory, and its role as the annual forum for the child phonology research community. The impact of the conference is underscored by a complete list of annual meetings over forty consecutive years, and by its being a place where, in one of the co-authors’ words, one ‘felt supported’, and where ‘some of the best and most lasting friendships and collaborations were either born or nurtured’.

4 In the spotlight

The chapter authored by David Ingram has the format of an annotated bibliography. Although it is intended to be browsed ‘as one might do with a book of poetry’, I am sure it will be read by many from beginning to end. David Ingram comments on his work, starting with his early publications (Ingram Reference Ingram1974a, Reference Ingramb, Reference Ingram1975), discussing the scientific atmosphere of the late 1970s, with an emphasis on how research methods were adapted for clinical applications, and offers brief glimpses into the origins of his ideas and his numerous interactions with other scholars. He recalls the neo-Jakobsonian approach with an anecdotal mention of his brief encounter with Roman Jakobson in 1972, discusses his research on categorising phonological disorders and developing whole-word measures, and much more.

5 Typical development

The chapters in this section tackle various aspects of phonological acquisition, not linked by a common focus or theme. Babatsouli offers a richly referenced review of the literature on the acquisition of Greek (in typical but also in clinical contexts), preceded by a characterisation of the phonology of the adult language. In the following chapter, Avivit Ben-David discusses the results of a large-scale normative study of the phonological (segmental and prosodic) development of Hebrew-speaking children (2;6–6;6), addressing the notions of universal markedness and the order of acquisition. Laura Cristina Villalobos-Pedroza tackles an understudied topic of prosodic development in relation to information management (contrastive focus expression); she reports the results of an acoustic study based on data from Mexican Spanish-speaking children, and accounts for the attested patterns in terms of the Effort Code (de Jong Reference de Jong1995, Gussenhoven Reference Gussenhoven, Bel and Marlien2002).

In Chapter 7, Joseph Paul Stemberger & Mario Chávez-Peón investigate the acquisition of ‘voiced stop’ sounds in the San Lucas Quiaviní variant of Valley Zapotec, an endangered Otomanguean language spoken in Oaxaca in Southern Mexico. Despite its preliminary character, this is a particularly compelling study of the acquisition of variable aspects of adult speech, with highly interesting theoretical implications. The ‘lenis’ consonants in Valley Zapotec are variable both in manner (stop ~ fricative) and voicing, showing certain context-dependent tendencies. In lenis stop variants, voicing alternates between true voiced and unvoiced (but never truly voiceless), both with short-lag Voice Onset Time. Fortis stops tend to be realised variably, with short-lag or long-lag VOTs. In general, fortis consonants consistently differ in duration from their lenis counterparts. A preliminary analysis of children's data (1;7–2;11) shows that they mimic the adult patterns of variation, but also depart from them in interesting ways. For example, they fully devoice lenis stops in word-final position; however, they preserve the ambient contrast along the temporal dimension. The study has important theoretical implications for the phonetic grounding of voicing and the fortis/lenis distinction, phonological/phonetic variability and the acquisition thereof. It also points to limitations of usage-based (Bybee Reference Bybee2007) or exemplar models (Pierrehumbert Reference Pierrehumbert, Bybee and Hopper2001), which rely on input frequency above all else. It seems that going beyond transcription data, i.e. analysing phonetic measurement data, would make some of these arguments even stronger.

In the last chapter in this section, Paulina Zydorowicz addresses the potential impact of sonority distance vs. an alternative proximity measure on the acquisition of consonantal clusters in Polish. The latter measure, called Net Auditory Distance (NAD; Dziubalska-Kołaczyk Reference Dziubalska-Kołaczyk2014), is calculated on the basis of manner and place of articulation scales. (Empirical verification of whether these scales reflect auditory measures, as suggested by the term, is required.) The data come from an audio recorded corpus of Polish-speaking children (1;7–3;2), available in the CHILDES database (Weist & Witkowska-Stadnik Reference Weist and Witkowska-Stadnik1986). Both sonority and NAD turn out to be significant predictors when they are interpreted as scalar preferences; only NAD is significant when they are treated as binary well-formedness conditions. Potentially, there is a further point of interest, which this preliminary study does not mention, but which can be inferred from some previous work on the topic. Jarosz (Reference Jarosz2017) analyses the same audio recordings, and argues that the observed early preference for higher sonority rises defies the adult stimulus, which abounds in sonority plateaus, and Łukaszewicz (Reference Łukaszewicz2000, Reference Łukaszewicz2006, Reference Łukaszewicz2007) investigates sonority-driven repair strategies in four- and five-year-olds, and reports that these strategies are suspended for obstruent clusters, which instead mimic the frequent sonority plateaus and reversals of the adult input. It would be interesting to see whether NAD calculations can shed further light on the apparently shifting roles of ‘markedness’ (universal proximity conditions) and input frequency in shaping the preferences in younger vs. older children.

6 Atypical development

The section begins with a theoretically oriented study by Typhanie Prince & Sandrine Ferré, who set out to establish the phonological status of s + obstruent clusters on the basis of data from typically and atypically developing French-speaking children, and tentatively advocate the ‘syllabic s’ analysis of such clusters in Government Phonology. The other papers in this section focus on issues which have (immediate or potential) relevance for clinical practice rather than abstract phonological theory.

Aleksandr N. Kornev & Ingrida Balčiūnienė analyse discourse corpora of typically developing Russian-speaking six-year-olds, their peers with primary language impairment and adult speakers of Russian, in order to test whether whole-word structure indices change adaptively according to different demands posed by different discourse genres (story telling and retelling, and reasoning conversations), an issue potentially relevant for clinical assessment. Shari DeVeney & Anastasia Kyvelidou search for early diagnostic signs of autism. They investigate how certain characteristics of early infant (non-speech and speech-like) vocalisations may be linked to later autism spectrum disorder (ASD) identification on the basis of a small-sample longitudinal study of infants at low vs. high risk, raised in a monolingual American English environment. In the following chapter, Gila Tubul-Lavy reports on an empirical study of the acquisition of codas in Hebrew-speaking children (2;6–5;6) diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech.

Two chapters deal with phonological awareness skills in Hungarian-speaking children, adopting quite different perspectives. Krisztina Zajdó & Enikő Csertán study the acquisition of phonological awareness skills in Hungarian-speaking elementary school children with mild general learning difficulties. Ágnes Jordanidisz, Katalin Mohai, Orsolya Mihály & Cheryl Winget discuss the potential advantages of a dynamic method of phonological awareness screening, whereby initial assessment (a syllable and phoneme deletion static test) is followed by an intervention (learning) phase and re-testing. The growth of phonemic awareness is studied independently of the onset of literacy, owing to the fact that reading is not taught explicitly at kindergartens in Hungary. The dynamic method discloses certain differences in phonological awareness between Hungarian-speaking pre-schoolers diagnosed as being at risk for dyslexia and their typically developing peers, which the static method does not reveal. An appealing side-effect of the dynamic method is that it introduces a more comfortable environment in which children are not only assessed, but also offered support to alleviate their difficulties.

Finally, Aline Mara de Oliveira, Gabriely Vitória Veschi, Luiza Polli, Cássio Eduardo Esperandino & Larissa Cristina Berti consider a potential differential diagnosis of children with phonological impairment and with suspected childhood apraxia of speech, using various speech-production assessment tools, adapted for Brazilian Portuguese.

7 Assessment and intervention

The chapters in this section focus on intervention procedures. Elise Baker, Rebecca J. McCauley, A. Lynn Williams & Sharynne McLeod use the Phonological Intervention Taxonomy to tackle the problem of designing an intervention plan so that it is best tailored to individual children's needs and to how these needs change over time. In the following chapter, Nancy J. Scherer, Renata Yamashita, AnaPaula Fukushiro, Marcia Keske-Soares, Debora Natalia de Oliveira, David Ingram, A. Lynn Williams & Inge Trindade use ‘Profiles of Early Expressive Phonological Skills’, adapted for Brazilian Portuguese, to investigate phonological and phonetic characteristics of speech of children with cleft palate; they classify the children's performance into speech-language/velopharyngeal profiles, relevant from the point of view of intervention. In the final chapter of the volume, Rianne van Lieburg, Esther Ottow-Henning & Brigitta Keij examine the prevalence, type and severity of Speech Sound Disorder (SSD) in Dutch-speaking toddlers diagnosed with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), and test the effectiveness of added group intervention targeting phonological development, administered separately from individual therapy sessions.

8 A few notes on the presentation of Polish

The volume abounds in cross-linguistic data; careful data documentation is one of the goals underscored in Babatsouli's ‘Prolegomenon’. For ‘a loving sympathy of the subject of investigation, yet under watchful restraint, lest it cloud the judgement’ (Joseph De Conte, cited by Babatsouli after Shinn Reference Shinn1900: 2), let me clarify some aspects of the presentation of the Polish phonological system which may be misleading to non-Polish readers.

Polish has a three-way distinction in coronal obstruents: denti-alveolars /s z t d / contrast with postalveolar (retroflex) /ʂ ʐ / and alveo-palatal (prepalatal) /ɕ ʑ / sounds. Assigning the series /ʂ ʐ / to the class of ‘alveolar’ sounds, as in Table 8.5 in Zydorowicz's chapter), does not reflect the postalveolar (retroflex) character of these sounds corroborated by instrumental studies (for a summary see Ladefoged & Maddieson Reference Ladefoged and Maddieson1996: 154; see also a recent study by Lorenc Reference Lorenc2018 using electromagnetic articulometry). This terminological idiosyncrasy also makes it impossible to establish the amount of difficulty they pose to a child learner. Polish-speaking children acquire these sounds last: the 90% criterion of normative renditions is reached at age 6 (Bryndal Reference Bryndal2015: 101).

The occasional references to Polish in the analysis of French sC vs. RT clusters in Prince & Ferré's chapter imply a much simpler structure than Polish actually has. Apart from sC clusters, Polish has many other obstruent–obstruent clusters word-initially; these can be composed of fricatives, stops and affricates in either order. Also, sonorant–obstruent sequences do occur in word-initial onsets, cf. /wza/ łza ‘tear (nom.sg)’ vs. /zwa/ zła ‘angry (fem.nom.sg)’. Note that there are no syllabic consonants in Polish: words such as łza pattern with monosyllabic words in terms of stress and rhythm. See also Gouskova's (Reference Gouskova2013: 178, n.1) comments on the absence of syllabic consonants in Russian, relevant from the point of view of Kornev & Balčiūnienė's chapter, where C is assumed to be one of ten syllable types in Russian.

Most chapters are richly referenced, a great asset of the volume; unfortunately, some references to Polish sources, Szuman (Reference Szuman1955) (in Chapter 1) and Zarębina (Reference Zarębina1965) (in Chapter 3), contain typos. Incidentally, the first Polish diary study was that of Baudouin de Courtenay, who collected notes on the development of his five children in the years 1885–1904; a part of this diary pertaining to the development of one of the children was edited by Chmura-Klekotowa (see Baudouin de Courtenay Reference Baudouin de Courtenay and Chmura-Klekotowa1974). While Baudouin's work has remained largely unknown to the wide international audience, he could be considered as a precursor of many modern ideas; some of his insights underlie central present-day phonological concepts as a result of the subtle and indirect influence they had on the Linguistic Circle of Prague (Anderson Reference Anderson1985: 56ff).

9 Concluding remarks

The volume contains a plethora of cross-linguistic empirical data on various aspects of phonological acquisition in children with or without diagnosed speech disorders, which will be of interest to a wide international speech-language therapy and linguistic audience (both practitioners and researchers). In general, the studies in the volume reflect the wide applicability of the now well-established transcription-based tools in child phonology research and clinical practice, but less so of current instrumental techniques or advanced analytical tools which would allow us to probe more deeply into the articulatory/auditory and phonological mechanisms underlying child phonology phenomena. Many of the reported studies are only very preliminary; nevertheless, they address important questions – most of which are of utmost practical clinical relevance, and some of which have interesting theoretical implications. Regarding the latter, the general phonology audience will find Stemberger & Chávez-Peón's chapter of special interest. In sum, the volume contains enough interesting themes to attract readers with interest in child phonology and speech diagnosis tools.